SELFSUSTAINED CROSS BORDER CUSTOMIZED CYBERPHYSICAL SYSTEM EXPERIMENTS FOR CAPACITY BUILDING AMONG EUROPEAN STAKEHOLDERS

Project Information

SMART4ALL

Grant agreement ID: 872614

DOI

10.3030/872614

Project closed

EC signature date 5 December 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 31 March 2024

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 8 660 872,50

EU contribution

€ 7 997 647,50

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF PELOPONNESE
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SMART4ALL (SELFSUSTAINED CROSS BORDER CUSTOMIZED CYBERPHYSICAL SYSTEM EXPERIMENTS FOR CAPACITY BUILDING AMONG EUROPEAN STAKEHOLDERS)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2024-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

SMART4ALL focuses on building capacity amongst European stakeholders via the development of self-sustained, cross-border experiments that transfer knowledge and technology between academia and industry. It targets CLEC CPS and the IoT and combines a set of unique characteristics that join together under a common vision different cultures, policies, geographical areas and application domains.
SMART4ALL consortium comprises of 25 partners originated from Central, South, and Eastern Europe, mainly from geographical areas that are underrepresented in European funding schemes and where there is a lack of DIHs to support companies in their digital transformation. A critical overall goal is to enable community building, strategy development and ecosystem learning for boosting high-end research and development for CLEC CPS and the IoT in South Eastern Europe (SEE), through an efficient combination of regional, national, and European (Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe) policies.
This will be achieved by supporting specific application areas, digitized environment, digitized agriculture, digitized anything, and digitized transport, that are not adequately represented in current SAE projects. However, in this context, SMART4ALL promotes a new concept of marketplace which is offered as a service (MaaS) that acts as one-stop-smart-shop by offering tools, services, and platforms (based mainly on open sources technologies) as well as technology suppliers and matchmaking capabilities customized to the four thematic pillars of the project.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

SMART4ALL devotes significant effort in supporting the New Skills Agenda for Europe and the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition by bringing together member state companies, partners specialized in networking, non-profit organizations, and education providers, who able to tackle the lack of digital skills in Europe. A unique aspect of SMART4ALL is the support of sensitive social groups by considering the regional, national, and European policies and by ensuring that innovation and technology will have major impact in the lives of people belonging in the specific categories.
During the first two reporting periods of the project, the activities of the SMART4ALL consortium concentrated on the following directions:
1. To bring innovative CLEC CPS and the IoT technologies to underrepresented business sectors.
2. Unlock South-Eastern parties’ potentials, through links to investors across value chains and regions in order to accelerate CLEC CPS/IoT solutions development and industrialization.
3. Develop/offer novel tools to boost the use of CLEC CPS and the IoT technologies Europe wide.
4. To ensure post-project sustainability and growth of the SMART4ALL experiments and DIHs cluster.
5. To bring innovative CLEC CPS and the IoT technologies in the lives of sensitive social groups.
6. To support Digital Skills & Jobs policy of European Commission.
All the above form a multifaceted and comprehensive nexus of objectives covering all important aspects of the scope of SMART4ALL as a DIH project.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Aligned with the European strategy for innovation, SMART4ALL will provide the means to join the fragmented European innovation and boost it to become a worldwide innovation leader. Through its DIH network, capacity building opportunities and novel marketplace services, SMART4ALL intends to play a key role in European innovation and Horizon Europe. SMART4ALL has designed a well-defined open call strategy to Pathfinder Application Experiments (PAEs) for supporting innovation and accelerating SMEs and startups. It also intends to establish a bilateral DIH based communication channel between market stakeholders and innovation producers (SMEs, academia, and research centers).

In this direction, SMART4ALL will offer the following opportunities and services:
• Set up through open calls three types of PAEs (KTE: Knowledge Transfer Experiments, FTTE: Focused Technology Transfer Experiments and CTTE: Cross-domain Technology Transfer Experiments) for PUSHing smart technologies to the market and PULLing smart technologies from the academic sector.
• Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS), a unique one-stop-smart-shop for experts and non-expert third-parties seeking (open-source mainly) ICT technologies that will reduce the development time of a startup/SME/mid-cap that is doing business in one of the four SMART4ALL thematic areas. In addition, AI based matchmaking and collaboration activities will be hosted in the MaaS.
• Coaching services from technical and market experts for business development of funded PAEs, from idea conceiving to proof of concept and, finally, product development.

SMART4ALL will set forward a new concept targeting to transform the one-stop-shop to one-stop-smart-shop through its Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform. Delivering novel AI based services and tools, the SMART4ALL MaaS aims to offer: (i) practical technical tools/services to accelerate design, development, prototyping, and manufacturing phases and (ii) brokerage, coaching, and guidance to access funds and pave the path towards market growth and investment. SMART4ALL will focus on the following four (4) underrepresented areas where the impact from promoting solutions with high computing capacity and low energy consumption would be a competitive advantage. These areas are: Digitized transport, Digitized Environment, Digitized Agriculture and Digitized Anything.
The SMART4ALL will be realized by 3rd parties underfunded and underrepresented PAEs. Towards this direction, SMART4ALL foresees a three-stage program: (1) in the first month, each PAE will detail the PAE major concept, define concrete steps and activities and the responsible person/actor for each of them, (2) in the core-months of the PAE, the 3rd parties will develop the application and set up the PAE, and (3) in the last months of the PAE, emphasis will be given to make the results of the PAE market-ready. The implementation of the business plans and all other activities are not included in the three justmentioned steps and will happen outside the framework of SMART4ALL PAEs. The duration of each PAE, depending on its type, can be between 3 and 9 months.
To implement its vision, SMART4ALL establishes MaaS which acts as one-stop-smart-shop, offering both technological and business services and connect a) SMEs and mid-caps that are interested in going digital to b) (Competence Centers) CCs and SMEs possessing CLEC CPS and the IoT competencies and experimentation resources and c) other auxiliary yet mandatory competencies (such as business) required to create results with a product/market fit. In this way, SMART4ALL: a) fosters customer-business-market oriented product development and b) harvests the fruits and at the same time feeds back smart specialization strategy.

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